


devoted to the church of my own survival

by aletterinthenameofsanity



Series: the odds were never in our favor [13]
Category: Hunger Games Series - All Media Types, The Umbrella Academy (TV)
Genre: Amnesia, Dark, Eventual Happy Ending, Five's got some fucked up ways of thinking about things, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Implied/Referenced Rape/Non-con, Nightmares, POV Number Five | The Boy (Umbrella Academy), Past Rape/Non-con, Pedophilia, Post-Canon, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Pre-Epilogue, Recovery, Unreliable Narrator, canon-adjacent for this series, i blame other UA fanfics and that one comment on my other fic, just mentioned but still there
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-07
Updated: 2019-09-07
Packaged: 2020-10-10 07:08:50
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,656
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20523983
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aletterinthenameofsanity/pseuds/aletterinthenameofsanity
Summary: After the war, President Handler is posthumously declared a war hero.No one knows what she nearly did. The children she would have killed, if only to blame the atrocity on the Capitol for propaganda efforts. The children she did hurt, in her quest for power and her own twisted view of justice.Five's self-defense (or, at least, that's what he tells himself) kill is what branded her a martyr. He's the one that turned her memory, her legacy, into something sacred rather than profane.And no one will ever know how much he hates himself for that fact.-When Five had killed President Handler, it had been for selfish reasons, yes. To protect his family. To keep everyone he loved from dying. To end the woman who threatened to end the only people he cared about in this world.And to take justice into his own hands, in a way. To keep her from ever touching him again.(Five recovers from the Games, the Capitol, and his time in Thirteen in the years after the Rebellion ends. It isn't always pretty.)





	devoted to the church of my own survival

**Author's Note:**

  * For [pamayapaya](https://archiveofourown.org/users/pamayapaya/gifts).
  * Inspired by [On This Day In History](https://archiveofourown.org/works/18332960) by [telm_393](https://archiveofourown.org/users/telm_393/pseuds/telm_393). 

> Title is from Clementine Von Radics.
> 
> So, uh, this was my headcanon of sorts for a wide section of the Rebellion portion of this series. It started with someone's comment rather early on in this series and then branched out far beyond that. I didn't really set it down into words since then, though, but a few fics I've read recently and a few other things have led me to finally be able to write this side of the story. Hope you guys enjoy, and don't hate me for dropping yet *another* side story to this series!
> 
> Also, if you want a song to listen to when reading, "Mr. Sandman" by SYML was what I listened to while writing. It really sets the mood of the fic.

_I have learned_  
_that memories_  
_are vicious,_

_they will always_  
_hold you close_  
_and drag you back_

_if you let them._

**― [Michelle K.](http://www.michellekpoems.tumblr.com/)**

During times of war, you do what you have to in order to get what's necessary done. Sometimes that means killing people, sometimes that means designing bombs, sometimes that means-

Five tries not to think about that time in District Thirteen anymore. President Handler's dead, after all. The war's over. Him and his family are finally out of the Arena.

But then, after the war, President Handler is posthumously declared a war hero. 

No one knows what she nearly did. The children she would have killed, if only to blame the atrocity on the Capitol for propaganda efforts. The children _she_ did hurt, in her quest for power and her own twisted view of justice.

Five's self-defense (or, at least, that's what he tells himself) kill is what branded her a martyr. He's the one that turned her memory, her legacy, into something sacred rather than profane.

And no one will ever know how much he hates himself for that fact.

\- 

Five hasn't ever had a romantic relationship, not like Klaus or Diego or Katniss. He doesn't have a Dave or a Eudora or a Peeta or even a Brian, like Allison had for just a little while.

He's content to be alone. To not be with someone.

(To not think about what he did with his body, what he was willing to trade in order to save his family-)

\- 

Five can't stop dreaming about it. He can't stop picturing it in his mind. He can't stop feeling her against him, her touching him, her star-bright eyes and scorching touch and the knowledge that all of this would be worth it if it just meant that his family survived-

Everyone has nightmares of the war. Everyone in his family has nightmares of the Arena.

What's one more nightmare to add to the bunch?

\- 

He was a child, Five sometimes finds himself thinking. He was just sixteen, and she did that to him. She took advantage of him-

But Klaus and Allison went through the same horrors, and for far, far longer. Does Five really have a right to complain? It was just a few times, and it didn't hurt him, not really.

And besides, he survived the Arena. He killed so many children in order to survive. This wasn't so bad, compared to that, in order to protect his family.

It was Five's choice to offer his body up to President Handler in order to get Allison, Luther, Vanya, and Dave back from the Capitol. In order to save his family. In order to-

-

It becomes harder and harder to justify at the trials of the Gamemakers and various high-profile Capitolites who did the exact same things to Klaus and Allison that President Handler did to Five.

Five finds himself vomiting at the night, throughout the trials. He's staying in a different room than the rest of his family, in a completely different apartment from all of them. His old Capitol apartment from during the Games that his calculations, he thinks, helped occasionally orchestrate.

He's been able to justify it for years. His body is a weapon, to be used to kill and survive and protect. His body and mind are to be used in service of the Capitol, killing the children of the Districts.

The clearest thing you learn in the Capitol, in the Games, from the moment your name is called: your body is not your own. 

For Victors, the Rebellion was as much about reclaiming your own body, your own personhood, as it was about reclaiming the country. It was about making your name the only name that would ever own your body again.

Too bad Five never got the chance to do that.

Five finds himself spending far longer in the shower than usual, scrubbing and scrubbing as if that might release some of the remaining memories from his skin. As if he could erase the stain of what he did from his body.

\- 

President Paylor suggests Five return to the new Capitol, to become a politician, to help the country with all of his skill at manipulation, both of politics and media.

And Five respects the woman. He really does. Dave and Klaus seem to really like her, after all, and she _does_ seem to have good intentions. She seems to want what's best for Panem and its people, is devoting herself to the people rather than the people to herself. 

But the last time a President got near him-

He refuses the offers to join the government every time, and every time she graciously accepts his refusal and just asks kindly after his family. He responds, maintaining all courtesy as he does so, but he can't wait until the conversation ends. As nice as Paylor is, he can't breathe freely until she's off the phone with him.

(Five knows he would do anything to save his family. He's given up everything he has, from his mind to his body, to protect them. If he ended up in the Capitol and the President asked him to hand over something to keep them safe- he would do it, he knows.

And selfishly, he doesn't want to put himself in that position. So he stays away.)

-

Tonight, Five wakes up screaming. It's been eight years since the war ended, thirteen years since he escaped that first Arena, but he's still screaming because there is still blood staining his nightmares, and this time it's not his or the other tributes' but instead his nieces and nephews, dying in the kindest nightmares and living in the worst, getting pressed into the same fate that Klaus and Allison were- 

He turns over in bed and vomits onto the ground, his hands shaking like they never did, not even in the Arena.

His body is not his own. It never has been. It's been the Games', and then the Capitol's, and then District Thirteen's, and then it was supposed to be _his_, just _his_, but he can't make these fucking nightmares go away-

But these children that the Rebellion saved- they will never have to learn how to make the decisions that he did. They will never have to trade away body and mind in order to protect the people they love.

This is the world Five fought to build. So that his family- from the Victors to their spouses to their children, from Allison to Luther to Klaus to Diego to Vanya to Katniss to Peeta to Dave to Alyssa to Eudora to Claire to Ben to Lily to Miguel to Rue- would be _safe_. So that they would never have to give up every part of themselves, so that they wouldn't have to make the choices he did, so that their childhoods would not become memories taken by greater powers.

When he leans back from vomiting, wiping his mouth, he finds Klaus squatting next to his bed, empathy in his eyes. Five freezes just a little, staring straight into Klaus' eyes.

"That wasn't a normal nightmare," Klaus says, and there's no way to fight the tone in his voice, firm and matter-of-fact in a way he never is. And Five knows that he knows, that Klaus can differentiate between nightmares about the war, nightmares about the Games, and nightmares about-

"Tell me I didn't wake up the kids," Five says first, hedging his answer.

Klaus shakes his head. "You didn't," he says as Allison enters the room, quiet, her hands flashing. (Getting her throat slashed in the Quell definitely didn't ruin her ability to hear, that's for sure.)

_Five,_ she says, stepping into the room and walking over to sit on the bed next to Klaus, _Tell us what's happening. What you're dreaming about. Please._

Five is twenty-five, now. He has nieces and nephews and is helping run a business and _he'd thought that he'd moved on. _He'd thought that he'd put it all behind him.

But he'd been lying to himself, hadn't he? Because he never dealt with his shit properly, he knows. He became a Mentor at age thirteen, threw himself into the Rebellion at age fifteen, let President Handler use his body at sixteen, ended a war at seventeen. He never took care of the nightmares in the years afterward, instead devoting his time to helping rebuild Twelve and giving his family a place to restart.

(He never returned his body to himself. He never dealt with the fact that every part of him was stolen by either the Capitol or President Handler, that he had never recovered enough to return his own body and mind to himself.)

"We won't let the kids know," Klaus says, "We won't tell anyone outside of us, I promise. Just...tell us, Five. You can trust us."

And Five knows that he can trust them, he does. If there's anyone in the world he can trust, it's the Victors who survived the Rebellion, the only people to intimately understand the nightmares that he still has, to this day.

It's just...all of this happened years ago. It's over with. The war ended and his family was protected and they're all safe, now.

Does he really need to bring it up, again? All those ancient memories, confined now only to his mind and no other record? What's the point of bringing them up? Why should he burden his family with the weight of all of these memories, when they don't carry much meaning in this new world they're living in? 

"Five," Diego asks, and Five's blood runs cold at his tone. He glances up to the door to find Diego standing there. He's not sure Diego's here and not at home with his wife and kids, how he knew to come here. "How did you convince President Handler to save them all?"

And Five knows that Diego knows- or, at least, has an idea of what happened. Of what Five did to convince President Handler save them.

-

Before Five bore the name Five, he had another name. No one ever remembers that name, remembers the boy he was before he became a killer.

Five doesn't really remember it, either. He doesn't remember much about his childhood at all, beyond Delores, but Delores was in the Reaping footage, hugging him, so she couldn't be as easily deleted as most details from his childhood, the things that no one in the Capitol would have cared about. 

Five was used to things being stolen from him by the time he entered Thirteen. President Handler stole things from his body, but the Capitol had stolen things from Five's mind first. They stole his name, stole his memories, stole every part of him.

Five doesn't remember being a child. His earliest crystal clear memory is his name was Reaped the day after he turned twelve-years-old. 

His memories after that, in the Capitol, are not ones that children have. Memories of Mentoring tributes to their deaths, of drowning his brain in alcohol, of building the tech that would power the Capitol's weapons and Arenas.

He hasn't seen himself as a child ever since he stepped onto that Capitol train, determined to make his way out of the Arena, no matter how many people he had to kill to do so.

Giving his body over to President Handler in order to get her to make the orders to save his family- it wasn't the choice of a child, no matter Five's age at the time. It was the choice of a Victor, an adult, a killer and a monster. It was the choice of a man who knew only violence and death and loss, who knew that even surviving meant not getting to keep what you had before you entered the Arena.

This bargain, letting President Handler take this from him- this was his way of trying to create a situation where he could choose the ending.

Maybe this time, if he gave her what she wanted and made sure to negotiate an ending in his favor, he would get to keep the people he loved after the theft was over. 

-

District Thirteen was supposed to be safe, Five knows. That's what everyone said. District Thirteen was a place for new beginning, where the Capitol couldn't touch them, where Victors could have happy endings-

But power is power is power is power, no matter the location, no matter the intentions, and Five knew how to manipulate that.

-

At the end of the day, Five was good at what he set out to do. Too good. Always too good. He became the killer. The propagandist. The media director. The war-maker.

The _whore_.

-

Five remembers it in flashes, in splintered memories that he has spent eight years trying to forget.

The way President Handler had kept pressing herself against him, the way her hands had lingered against his shoulders, the way her lips had curved whenever she looked at him, the way she'd whispered in his ear-

Five had spent years in the Capitol. He'd watched the ways that Capitolites interacted with Klaus and Allison. He knew what it looked like when a Capitolite wanted to fuck a Victor. What it looked like when a Capitolite would be willing to trade money or secrets for their sexual use of a Victor's body.

So when Five had needed to get Allison and Luther out and rational argument and pleading hadn't worked, when he'd been getting more and more desperate-

He knew what he could use. Sure, he'd never had sex before, but that hadn't stopped him from making promises and doing things to bring Allison and Luther home. That hadn't stopped him from stopping by President Handler's rooms and offering himself over in exchange for their safe rescue and return.

-

The first lesson that every Victor learns is that your body is not your own. 

-

When Five had killed President Handler, it had been for selfish reasons, yes. To protect his family. To keep everyone he loved from dying. To end the woman who threatened to end the only people he cared about in this world.

And to take justice into his own hands, in a way. To keep her from ever touching him again.

-

Five didn't think he could learn what horror looks like on his family's faces. He'd thought that they'd gone through so much that nothing else would shock them.

And he'd been right, to an extent. Allison, Klaus, Diego- none of them look horrified. There's empathy in Allison and Klaus' eyes, simmering resentment in the lines of Diego's face, but horror? Not quite. A twitch of the face here, a grimace there, yes. But not horror.

It's been years since President Handler died at Five's hands, and even more years since their Arenas. They've seen far worse. Allison and Klaus personally _know_ what it's like to go through much worse, and for much longer.

But still- he hadn't wanted them to know. Despite the fact that they know what it's like to make that decision, Five knows his family. He knows that they will feel guilty for what happened.

President Handler made sure no one else knew, he knows. She couldn't have handled the political fallout from using one of the Victors like that. So in a way, he was protected by the secrecy as well. As long as he didn't tell, the secret would have died with her. No one would have known.

He had the option, now, to tell. To let it lay in the past. To let the truth of what happened die with her.

But looking at Klaus and Allison, who did the exact same thing for him that he did for them- they get it. They are not people that he has to hide the truth from. They aren't the kids, growing up in a world that is blessed by a lack of a dictator and a Games looming over their lives. 

They lived in the world he did. They made the same decisions that he did. To give their bodies to up, to protect their broken little family that's been able to grow into something so much bigger because of the sacrifices they made to protect everyone. 

Klaus sits down on the bed on the opposite side of Five than Allison is sitting on. He doesn't touch Five, doesn't place a hand on his shoulder or knee, doesn't try to hug him, and Five's thankful.

"What happened to you-" Klaus says, "That wasn't okay. That wasn't right. And it wasn't your fault."

"It's a trade you shouldn't have had to made," Diego says, voice firm but fragile as he squats down in front of Five. "But we understand why you made it."

_You did what you had to in order to protect the people you loved,_ Allison gestures.

It's simple, isn't it? Years of dehumanization and pain, of nightmares and missing memories and intimacy given away that he can never get back- it was what was necessary to protect them. To keep them safe. To survive.

Five's hands are shaking as they never did when he killed the Careers. When he killed the girl from Five. When he orchestrated the invasion of the Capitol. 

His body is his own, now. It's not a weapon. He's just a man, whose memories begin with the Games and end here and now, with his family on all three sides. He is a man with memories formed of war and manipulation, who has had to build an entirely new world in order to gain any memories of peace.

"You survived the worst possible things," Klaus says, finally placing a hand on Five's shoulder. "You survived despite the fact that they didn't want you to."

Five survived, and President Handler didn't. President Hargreeves didn't. Five's family survived, in spite of everything President Handler and President Hargreeves tried to do.

They won. At the end of the day, their bodies _were_ their own.

Five takes a deep breath. "You're right," he says, and he thinks it might be the first time he's ever said that. "You're _right_."

Diego lets out a small laugh. "First time we've ever heard you say that."

"Don't get used to it," Five says, and Allison smiles.

_Don't worry_, she says, _We wouldn't._

-

Weeks later, Five visits the graveyard in which President Handler's body is buried. This graveyard is one of many in which the heroes of the Rebellion are buried, with this particular one on the border of Twelve and Thirteen.

No one's here, right now. It's the middle of winter and this particular memorial is empty save him and Luther, who has come to look over some of the memorials here in the graveyard.

And for the past five minutes, they've been staring at the gravestone of one particular individual.

"We can get her removed, if you want," Luther says, and he doesn't know the full story, but he knows _enough_. Or, maybe, he can read Five well enough to understand how he feels about this gravestone, too grand for the woman who was ready to kill children to end the Capitol.

(Then again, Five was willing to kill children, too. Just not _those_ children. Just not those particular people.

But hurting children in the intimate, specific way she did to him- no. He never would have done that. So he supposes there _is_ a rather big difference, there.)

Five shakes his head. "Just leave it," he instructs, still able to summon that snippy, bossy voice he used during the Rebellion. "It doesn't matter."

And Five's telling the truth. He just wants to live with his family, to let the kids have a life untainted by the knowledge of what their parents and uncles and aunts went through in order to bring them the peaceful world they live in.

"Do you want me to give you a moment, then?" Luther asks, and Five realizes that he's been staring at the tombstone a bit too hard, with eyes a bit too narrow.

So he nods, and Luther says, "Then I'll go head back to the train. Meet you there whenever you're ready to head back into the Village?"

Five nods again, and Luther heads off, leaving Five to stare at the gravestone for a long moment.

Maybe there isn't a way to bring her memory the justice it truly deserves, but as least he can show her just how much he's grieving her loss.

So he spits on her grave.

Even if this didn't do anything to fix the problem, Five feels good. He feels nearly satisfied, for nearly the first time in his life (the only other times in his life he's felt this good have been with his family), and fuck President Handler's memory is she thinks she can take that from him.

"You all good?" Luther asks as Five boards the train, and Five nods, sliding his brother a smirk.

"Fucking fantastic," he says, and he knows that he's going to have nightmares going forward, but something has settled within his stomach. Closure, he might have called it, if he believed in such a thing.

Perhaps it's the fact that she doesn't own him anymore. There might be nightmares, there might be bad dreams, there might still be that pain in his side from that final fight where he killed her, but she's dead. He's alive. Five survived, while President Handler didn't. _He's_ the one who gets to determine the path of the world, not her.

"Time to go home, then," Luther says with a small smile, and Five thinks of their village in the former District Twelve. About the large amount of people he now calls family. About all the people who he didn't let the Handler kill.

Yeah, it's time to go home. And Five's so glad that they are.


End file.
